A Diplomacy for the Next Decade

Aid and development have been something of a feature of the foreign policy debate this month. First, in an underreported move, DfID launched its new UKAID logo on 6 July. Combined with other initiatives, the rebrand is intended give more strategic focus to Britain's aid policy. Next, U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), a move designed to integrate the aid and development functions more fully into the nation's diplomacy. Just two days later, David Cameron launched One World Conservatism, a 64-page International Development green paper outlining the Conservative approach to the very same issues and then, to complete the picture, on 14 July the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on the Kurdistan region of Iraq published its report on the challenges facing British policy there.

All this has left foreign policy commentators somewhat breathless, so if you are wondering why posting has been light, this is why. The flurry of activity around issues of aid and development has left me struggling to catch up. Having finally read the Conservative’s green paper, my first thought is that it is something of a mixed bag. For the past decade, Western diplomacy has been operating according to a flawed strategic doctrine. This much is a given. While this document goes someway towards repairing it, at the same time it too is deeply flawed. It is long on rhetoric, and short on detail. And where there is detail, it does not make either for great reading or coherent strategy.

Of course, as green paper this is only the beginnings of the new diplomacy, but it does address issues of vital strategic concern and so it is important that, between now and the first white paper, key arguments are strengthened, core concepts refined and flaws in some of the underlying thinking ironed out. With those caveats it mind, as a basis for consultation it is to be welcomed, and so what disappointed me most was the reaction from the Tory grass roots. Early reaction was mixed. As the debate developed, however, attitudes appeared to harden, an impression later reinforced by a PoliticsHome poll showing that, of Conservative-minded voters, a full 81% disagree with Cameron on the issue of DfID funding. And make no mistake, this was not disagreement on some minor point of detail. This was vigorous, visceral, ideologically-driven disagreement on a major point of principle. It is as though we have learned nothing from the failed diplomacy of the last 10 years.

At a time when the future of the mission in Afghanistan is in question, for the Tory grass roots to urge a cut in DfID spending is absurd. More than that, it is the height of irresponsibility. Incredibly, while we have spent £2.66bn on defence, DfID spending in Afghanistan totals a pathetically small £166m, and yet at no point in the debate did there seem to be any acknowledgement that the quickest way to defeat in Afghanistan is to reduce the aid and development budget still further. Similarly, the future success of Iraq policy depends wholly on the extent to which trade and investment flows can be increased. This, in turn, hinges upon continued assistance from UKAID in the areas of good governance, capacity building and infrastructure development. These are two concrete examples of how issues around aid and development affect strategy and yet still the clamour from the Tory grass roots is for reductions.

The problem is partly one of framing. Much of the debate around issues of aid and development is given a mawkish, sentimental gloss that obscures the wider strategic and security dimension. And so we need to reframe the debate. We need to move away from the idea of aid as ‘charity'. There need to be strict conditionalities attached and enforced, full transparency, and mechanisms of real accountability right across the aid and development portfolio. Also, and more importantly, there needs to be a clear strategic focus. Much as the Americans are seeking to do with their new QDDR initiative, we need to place strategic and security concerns at the centre of development policy. We need to ensure that, wherever possible, morality and strategy reinforce each other, instead of working on separate tracks.

On the headline question of the DfID budget, however, Cameron is right. He is right for the same reason the new Obama administration is right. We can no longer design a diplomacy around military force. Anyone who thinks the West is going to put another army into the field any time soon has not been paying attention. The whole trend in today’s diplomacy is towards a more subtle blend of elements. The aim being to bring both hard and soft elements of power into the mix. Once you concede that, the focus shifts immediately to other instrumentalities, first among them aid and development. And so the new American administration is busy designing a new diplomacy around these vital functions. With this policy announcement, Tory thinking is aligning itself with this new diplomacy. Underlying it all, of course, is the recognition that, even more than the American, the British war fighting capability has been seriously degraded by more than a decade of foreign policy activism. For the foreseeable future, war fighting is likely to be off the agenda. And so if we want to retain any foreign policy clout, it is going to have to be in the aid and development fields. The alternative is to have no foreign policy at all. And so those who are serious about foreign policy should support this announcement.

That said, the Americans are still way ahead of us on this issue. The biggest failure of Western diplomacy over the last decade was in the area of development policy, this largely a result of the now widely recognised disconnect between diplomacy and development. The American response has been to design a new institutional architecture, with the head of USAID now reporting directly to the Assistant Secretary of State. The Conservative response is much more tentative, the green paper committing them to the much more modest idea of enhancing the Stabilisation Unit so that it can “break through departmental rivalries and jealousies”, and it is in this respect that the document really falls down. The problem is that it leaves the main features of the existing structure in place. The whole, sorry story of the last decade of Western policy is a direct legacy of the institutional changes of the late 1990s. In the United States, the strategic debate was marred by the growth of two separate bureaucracies and two separate appropriations processes. Here in the UK, policy has been similarly afflicted.

The idea of separating out the aid and development functions into DfID was that this would strengthen the voice of the aid and development functions by placing their arguments at the centre of the debate – at the ‘top table’ as it were – well, that conception has proved an utter failure. Whatever way one looks at it, the changes of the 1990s have been found wanting. Throughout the Iraq misadventure, DfID simply failed to make its voice heard. As a stand-alone concept it is in many ways an absurd creature. Lacking strategic focus, it attacks problems at the margins, leaving the core issues of poor governance and underdeveloped civic infrastructure untouched. But of course, this kind of peripheral work, this idea of working on the fringe, is built into the concept from the outset. Once you separate out the functions in this way, by definition aid and development policy do not figure in the strategic mix. Aid and development are relegated to the margins, considered only as an afterthought, an addendum, and you arrive at the absurd situation where DfID spent less in Afghanistan in 2007-8 than it did in Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Tanzania.

This is possible only once development and diplomacy become decoupled in this way, and so, between now and any future white paper, I would like to see much more thought given to the institutional aspect of the problem. We are told on page 58 that the enhanced Stabilisation Unit will report directly to the new National Security Council, but in the absence of any detailed policy discussion of this aspect of the proposal, we are unclear about exactly how, and will therefore have to reserve judgement.* My fear is that we are building strategic confusion into the concept from the start. As things stand, the proposal is for what looks like a kind of halfway house, a sort of semi-autonomous structure, without any real strategic focus or bite. It all seems to me like a recipe for strategic and operational muddle. I would like to see our response echo the American model, with a more streamlined structure and clear lines of accountability. This means undoing the reforms of the late 1990s and collapsing the whole thing into one structure by bringing DfID back under the control of the FCO.

Ultimately, the way to resolve issues around framing, but also the more serious issues around policy and strategy, is to rid ourselves of the kind of compartmentalised thinking that gave us this bifurcated institutional architecture with development and diplomacy operating on completely separate tracks. For all the good work that it does, and it does do good work, on all the big questions DfID has proved the most monstrous and murderous extravagance; a failure of conception, management and implementation. And it needs to be rectified. The Tories go some way towards this in their new green paper, but not nearly far enough. It may be that the proposed National Security Council answers these concerns. We shall have to wait and see. I certainly hope so.

*UPDATE: Mark Phillips, Chief of Staff to the Shadow Security Minister, has confirmed that the Tories expect to publish their green paper on national security at the beginning of September.

Smart Power: the key to Obama's grand strategy

Interesting figures out this week from worldpublicopinion.org indicating just how far Obama still has to go to repair the damage wrought by the previous administration. FiveThirtyEight.com and PBS do a similar job chewing over the numbers, each drawing out the headline figures showing that, though Obama’s personal popularity is way ahead of that of George W. Bush, America’s numbers are still flat-lining.

So, what to make of them. On one level, these figures do not really tell us anything new. What they do is underscore what we already know; contra the claims of the previous administration that “they hate us for our freedom”, the real driver of anti-Americanism is dissatisfaction with American policy, not any deeper ideological or philosophical antipathy. On the extremes, of course, there is very real ideological hostility, but the great mass of people across the world retain a deep sense of affection and admiration both for the American system of government, and for its broader ideals.

The well known Pew Global Attitudes survey, mapping opinion across 54 countries from 2000 to 2008 pointed to much the same set of conclusions. Its key finding, for those that were minded to hear it, was that it was opposition to key elements of George W. Bush’s foreign policy that sent U.S. favourables plummeting, not any implacable opposition to freedom or to the American idea. This was true even of America’s closest allies. Deep levels of dissatisfaction with American policy in Britain, France and Germany did not turn them into enemies overnight. Like much of the rest of the world, Germany, Britain and France remain supportive of American leadership, they simply want a different kind of American leadership. What they want is a less abrasive diplomacy, a more restrained strategic posture, and above all a demilitarised policy.

The background to these disagreements is familiar enough. Throughout the Cold War, the various elements of the policy mix worked in something of a tandem; economic, development, aid and security policy were for the most part mutually supportive elements in a coordinated strategy. Then, somewhere near the end of the Clinton presidency, around the time talk of America’s ‘unipolar’ moment begins to surface and the intellectual groundwork for the Bush presidency is being laid, policy becomes overly militarised. Elements in the mix become dangerously unbalanced. Far too much emphasis is placed on the military aspects of power, the humanitarian and development aspects of policy are derided as ‘social work’, George W. Bush famously claims that “we don’t do nation building”, and a foreign policy consensus spanning forty years and ten administrations is cast aside in favour of a much more muscular and assertive strategy.

In response, around the time of the Iraq war, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., former Assistant Secretary of Defence for International Security Affairs under President Clinton, begins to develop the concept of soft power. Soft power refers to all the non-military aspects of power. On one level, Nye’s distinction is unhelpful. By separating out the international development and aid functions and bundling them together under the umbrella term ‘soft’ power, he invites exactly the kind of sneering, dismissive response one would expect from foreign policy hawks pumped up on American military supremacy. But the concept is sound. The key is not to focus on one element or aspect to the exclusion of the other, but rather to find the right blend of elements, the right policy mix. Smart power is the ability to combine all the different elements of your power - both hard and soft - in support of your strategic objectives. It is a conception of power, and of strategy, that aims to bring all the various elements of American power to bear. Its aim is to add a strategic dimension to the aid and development functions so that they more fully cohere with national security objectives.

Starting out from the central principle of Amercian foreign policy, namely the commitment to the Kantian peace and democracy as a constituent element of it, the broad strategic objective is to move from closed systems to more open ones, to move the developing world towards better governance; to transition out of pre-modern forms of governance towards stable democracies, or at the very least systems that are in some sense representative, recognise basic human rights, and allow for peaceful transitions of power. This for the simple reason that open systems rationalise behaviour, making for more responsible actors on the international stage. Governments that act responsibly at home, act responsibly abroad. The idea that the military is the only instrument capable of nudging these societies along the path towards better governance is, of course, absurd. And yet for eight long years under the failed presidency of George W. Bush, policy focused on this aspect of power to the almost total exclusion of every other facet of our capability.

Thankfully, we are now moving away from that kind of lopsided reliance upon and exaggerated faith in, hard power. The downside of the new approach is that we are no longer talking about the headline-catching stuff. And so support for the strategy will be that much harder to maintain. For a commentariat used to instant results, this will come as a shock. There are no quick fixes, no magic bullets; repairing America’s battered image is no mere cosmetic exercise. This is not foreign policy as usual. This is not foreign policy as the neoconservatives conceive it. It is not foreign policy as show business. It is not Hollywood movie, nor is it bedtime story. There are no simplified or simplifying narratives. This is foreign policy for grown ups, it is the hard slog of diplomacy, containment, international development and aid work; the unfashionable stuff, the messy stuff that doesn’t fit into easily into the news cycle. The only stories this strategy generates are the kind that send news editors on the foreign desks to sleep. It doesn’t sell newspapers and no big money defence contracts hinge on it so there is no support in the media or parliament for it. But it is vital work. It is the nuts and bolts of diplomacy and it is a crucial element in our national security policy. That is why it was so encouraging to hear news this week that Secretary Clinton is to launch a new development initiative.

We will have to await the details of the announcement to more fully assess the likely impact, but slowly, surely, the Obama administration is edging towards a fully integrated aid, development and security policy. This is a welcome development, but also a return to an earlier, more rounded conception of power, and of strategy, that is sorely needed. It is the conception of power that won the Cold War. It is the conception of power and of strategy that has underwritten American security for the best part of sixty years and it is a conception that got lost in the heady triumphalism surrounding the unipolar moment and the devastating confusion and loss of 9/11. Slowly but surely the Obama administration is restoring a measure of balance to American grand strategy. My closing thought is simply this: while they are doing it they deserve not to be shouted down, sniped at and second-guessed, least of all by the architects of the failed Bush policy.